Expedition 32 Crew Lifts Off

At 9:40 p.m. CDT a Soyuz TMA-05M rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Expedition 32 Commander Yuri Malenchenko, NASA Flight Engineer Sunita “Suni” Williams and JAXA Flight Engineer Akihiko Hoshide to the International Space Station. It was a beautiful launch on a hot summer day at the Cosmodrome — watch the video after the jump:

(My favorite part was when the Soyuz punched a hole in the clouds!)

Exact time of the launch was 9:40:3.91 CDT, docking with the ISS will occur on Monday at 11:52 p.m. CDT. Read more about the crew of Expedition 32 here.

Of historical note, the Expedition 32 launch occurred on the same day that the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project launched in 1975. Designed to test the compatibility of rendezvous and docking systems and the possibility of an international space rescue, the nine-day Apollo-Soyuz mission brought together two former spaceflight rivals: the United States and the Soviet Union. Without the success of that project, we might not have had an International Space Station in orbit today.

I’ve never heard a good explanation of why it takes two days to get to the ISS. Surely a precise launch could get them there in hours. Is it to give them time to adapt to micro-gravity (to stop throwing up)?

It’s easier said than done; it’s considered too dangerous to launch any rocket directly towards the ISS, so rockets are deliberately launched when the ISS is not passing directly overhead at the time of the rocket launch.